Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ are you doing out here anyway? Why aren’t you inside working? You know, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in the light of day?” I said.

      “I’m pale. I’ve become a mushroom. Summer has come and gone and I’m a nice shade of silvery white,” he said.

      He’d been concentrating on trying to get his marble-white skin to sop up some sun. That’s what all the profundity had been about.

      I ruffled his messy silver and black curls with my fingers. “You spend all your time indoors, you silly workaholic. You need some fresh air and vitamin D.”

      He said broadly, “Yes, it’s true. I’m doomed.” His voice was thick with pleasure, as though doom were something delicious, like a plate of chocolate éclairs or homemade ravioli. “How’s Matilde today?”

      “Hot to trot,” I replied. “How else would she be?”

      “Yes. I suppose she couldn’t be any other way. She’s the eighth wonder of the world, that Matilde,” said Lance, and he led the way inside.

      We went into the first studio. I pulled the script for La Chanteuse out of my knapsack.

      “It’s just the two of us this morning,” explained Lance. “I think we can get the biggest scene wrapped up if we really concentrate.”

      La Chanteuse was an “art film” set in Paris. I’d done a little work for Lance in the past whenever there was a voice to be dubbed that had to sing, as well, but this was the first time I’d ever seen so much pork in one of our films. Or so much porking, for that matter.

      The protagonist, Matilde, was an opera star who couldn’t perform unless she had sex first. A lot of sex. Megasex. Unfortunately, the man she was in love with was a married pig farmer and she was forever chasing him and his salami all over Paris and outskirts. They had sex everywhere; they rolled in the pigpen mud (when his homely wife wasn’t there), between the prosciutti and ham hocks, they had sex with a side of bacon watching them. Sometimes the pig farmer left his homely wife at home, dressed up and came into town to see Matilde. Then they had sex in the park, on and under the Eiffel Tower, in the corridors of the Louvre, under restaurant tables at the Plaza, on the bathroom floor and in the elevator of Matilde’s apartment. It was awesome. Every time Matilde came, her screaming orgasm would swell and rise and turn into warm-ups, scales and arpeggios. Then when all the heavy breathing had finally subsided, she was away to the Paris Opera for the evening, where she washed off the smell of swineherd and gave the performances of her life.

      La Chanteuse goes along pretty much like that right up to the end, until the homely wife murders them both, makes them into sausages and sells them at the local market. A bit too moralistic for my tastes but I guess there had to be human bloodshed in order for there to be a decent denouement.

      And I have to confess that although it was a truly silly film, there were moments when I could really relate to Matilde’s impossible obsession. I was no stranger to obsessions myself.

      For a couple of hours, Lance and I stood across from each other going over and over the scenes, getting them right, wailing, adoring, whispering, grunting, panting and moaning on cue into the microphones. My arpeggios and vocal ornaments had been well rehearsed beforehand. Lance was a professional. In his dubs you never heard false notes. You never saw the mouths wagging on hours after the sound of speech had stopped. Ours was quality work. But it was a little unnerving that the actress playing Matilde looked a bit like me, with long blond hair and annoyingly large breasts, and the actor playing the pig farmer looked like Lance, a prematurely graying Greek god with iron-poor blood.

      By one o’clock, I was getting hungry. My stomach was starting to rumble so loudly that the microphone picked it up. Lance looked up from the script and then at his watch.

      “Nice work, Miranda. We’ll have to stop now. I have the kung fu kids in about twenty minutes. You’re doing a great job. Low-budget orgasms. They’re such a riot. We still have four and a half of them to go before we get hacked up and made into bratwurst.”

      He shut off some of the equipment and came over to me, moving with the slow prowl of big jungle felines. “Just let me smell you again before you go.” He pulled me into him and pressed his face into my hair. “Mmmmm.”

      “Lance, Lance.” I felt as though I was rousing a person from sleep.

      “What?” He looked up and into my eyes. A CAT scan was less probing than Lance’s gaze.

      “I’m a hoping-to-be-involved woman.”

      “Hoping-to-be-involved? Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

      “It hasn’t actually been…ah…consummated yet.”

      His eyes drilled me. “You poor faux-virgin. May I ask who the lucky swine is?”

      “No,” I said, still irritated that I wasn’t allowed to name Kurt Hancock as my possible significant-other-to-be.

      “No? Ah, come on,” provoked Lance.

      “He wants it to be our little secret. He’s a high-profile guy. He doesn’t want the gossip or the press.”

      Lance smiled and kissed my hand. “I’m sure that whoever he is, Miranda, he’s a complete and utter bastard and not nearly good enough for you. I know men.”

      “Yes, Mommy.”

      “Let’s kill Matilde off once and for all, okay? Can you make it tomorrow?”

      I nodded.

      “Oh, and remind me to pay you tomorrow.”

      “Pay me tomorrow, Lance. Please, pay me.” I could see that KLM jet edging eastward.

      This time tomorrow I would be a different woman. Yes, Matilde would have her pig farmer, but I would have been had and had again by Kurt. Finally.

      Chapter 3

      Off with the Doc Martens and back into the Adidas. I thought I was so smart, running everywhere and talking all my employers into working around my schedule. I was like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces were connected but the outlines still visible, and other pieces were still missing. I was not a complete picture.

      I ate one of Grace’s shrimp, rocket and lemon-pepper mayonnaise croissants as I power walked back in the direction of Davey Street. It was so delicious, and I was so hungry that for a moment I considered marrying Grace and forgetting all about Kurt Hancock.

      I hurried through the door of Little Ladies Unlimited—a cleaning company housed in a big bleak one-story concrete block. Inside, there was just the barnlike unadorned storeroom where all the equipment was kept, and the tiny office, from which Cora, the owner, took all the client calls and kept everything running smoothly. At the end of the ranks of industrial vacuum cleaners, the other two women on my cleaning team were standing at the coffee machine. They were having a hot debate about whether drip or plunge was better.

      “No contest. Plunge,” I joined in. “Now, whose husband are we talking about?”

      “Coffeemakers not husbands,” said Fern, smoothing down her brassy scouring-pad hair with a tiny hand. She was smiling. “And on that subject, Miranda, when are you going to get yourself СКАЧАТЬ